Todos e cada um de nós: O interesse público como critério de desenvolvimento humano

This article seeks to approximate public interest and human development. Under the assumption that public interest, considered from a comprehensive approach, is a criterion of human development, it brings closer the legal understanding of public interest, related to the effectiveness of human rights and basic freedoms, with Development Economics, enlarging the field of research to the elementary conceptual foundation of the so-called “Capability Approach”. After pointing out that public interest imposes a common sense of life based on collective values and related to a plexus of moral feelings that are part of the structure of societies (“publicness”), it is argued that this understanding should rule governmental and human actions. The demonstration of the working hypothesis, performed by exploratory bibliographic research, involves a reading suggestion of public interest linked to human development in three levels. For each of them, the analysis of usual human development metrics is provided. However, considering the addition of a third level, it is concluded that is necessary to draw an alternative metric (which evolves the usual conceptions) where the equations that compose human development include public interest, which is carried out speculatively with data collected from Latin American countries.